MUNA

MUNA has been building toward something for a decade, and it is hard to say exactly what the destination looks like, only that the band seems to know where it is going. The Los Angeles trio of Katie Gavin, Naomi McPherson, and Josette Maskin spent years on a major label making records that were greeted with critical warmth and audience indifference before everything changed at once. Their self-titled 2022 album on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory label made the kind of quiet impact that gets louder over time. By 2024, people who had ignored them for years were catching up. By early 2026, they are the kind of band whose name appears on a petition to close an ICE detention facility and the news coverage notes them as a marquee signatory.

That last detail is not a detour. MUNA has always made music that is explicitly political about the body, about queerness, about what it costs to exist at the intersection of several kinds of difference. But the politics have never been the thing you notice first. What you notice first is how well-made the songs are.

Gavin’s voice is the center. It has a quality that is hard to describe precisely: conversational but not casual, emotionally direct but not theatrical. She sounds like someone telling you something true in real time rather than performing the truth. McPherson and Maskin build the music around that quality, and the results, at their best, achieve a kind of synthetic warmth that feels like a contradiction resolved. The synth-pop architecture is cold by design. The voice turns it into something that holds heat.

The 2022 album’s “Silk Chiffon” became their calling card partly by accident. The song, which features Phoebe Bridgers and is built from one of the most efficient pop hooks of the decade, spread through queer spaces first before crossing into wider consciousness. That crossover did not compromise the band’s specificity. If anything, it clarified it. MUNA makes music explicitly for and about people who have spent their lives learning to take up less space. The records tell those people to take more.

Formed in Los Angeles while the three were students at USC, the band released Saves the World on RCA in 2019 to positive reviews and limited commercial traction. The move to Saddest Factory reset the context around them. Bridgers’ label had credibility in the indie world that RCA never provided. The self-titled record came out in a summer when queer visibility in indie pop was high and MUNA’s moment arrived. They had been making records good enough to deserve a moment for years. They just needed the room to be arranged correctly.

There is no new album confirmed as of this writing. But the band’s presence on the cultural conversation, from their political advocacy to their continued live performances, suggests an artist in the middle of something rather than coasting on what they have already done. MUNA is in the business of growth, and the growth feels genuine. That is rarer than it sounds.